Retail + Digital

Tag Archives: Nordstrom

Here’s a round-up of January’s more interesting phygital retail bytes:

CES kick-starts the year with a host of innovative tech ideas and nascent, phygital developments to watch with retailers in mind. This year, wearables finally got exciting, the IoT (Internet of Things) got closer to reaching breaking point in our homes, and consumers saw how technology is ready to transform the shopping experience. My favourite round-ups from Bloomberg Business Week and Brand Channel touched on many key trends.

Estimote beacons

The Retail Big Show in New York closely follows CES, and the role of technology in stores increases with importance every year. This year, the show profiled eBay’s connected store concept, currently on trial at Rebecca Minkoff and Nordstrom stores, according to this report in Retail Design World, and magic mirrors were the top attraction according to Retailing Today’s review. Disruptive retail strategy was one of the show’s key take-outs for Retail Touchpoints while mobile apps that are enabling beacon technology uptake was top of the buzz list for CNBC.

Neiman Marcus has installed interactive inventory tables that blend into its footwear departments, and will spur sales conversions according to Luxury Daily.

Omni-channel is the word of 2015 for eBay, that has just launched its new sellers platform: Retail Associate Platform, according to WWD.

Mall rats are not dead, they are part of retail’s big phygital strategy, says Kevin McKenzie, Westfield’s global chief digital officer, who talks to the Business of Fashion about Westfield’s new World Trade Centre location in New York.

Virtual retail is a step closer thanks to Microsoft’s new Holo Lens headset. Here Dezeen suggests what might be possible.

Tommy Hilfiger has launched a digital showroom that is shaking up the fashion buying world.

Pinterest is gaining traction among advertisers as brands flock to the channel’s ‘Pinfluencers’, according to the Wall Street Journal. And stylish influential men are Pinterest’s new target, as the image curation site works on its search functionality with ‘geek’ content.

AdAge has a refreshing take on how Snapchat could kill the trend for consumer showrooming in stores via one-off snap coupons or scavenger hunt style retail promotions.

Fashion and beauty brands are combining user-generated content with discovery-commerce opportunites on Instagram. Joining the Insta-commerce party is Preen.Me, a platform that has recently run exclusive deals with Tweezerman and Bumble & Bumble, according to WWD (sub req).

The worlds of online and offline retail are merging with increasingly compelling examples of personalised product meets convenient service = winning combination.

Kate Spade eBay digital store front, New York

The phy-gital retail trend is here to stay, exemplified by early adopters such as eBay, Bonobos, FAB and more recently Etsy, Birchbox and the trailblazing eyewear specialist Warby Parker. These online pure-players have all dipped their digital toes in physical waters, opening showroom and pop-up style stores with largely successful results (Warby Parker says its eight stores sell an average $3,000 worth of product per square foot annually, according to the Wall Street Journal).

What’s interesting is that the phy-gital trend also works the other way. The flipside is that physical retailers are also enhancing the store experience with data-enriched shopping experiences that online retailers have been used to offering for years. As J Skyler Fernandes, MD of Simon Venture Group, said at the Wired Retail conference late last year, the mall is not dead, it just needs to embrace the digital natives that now shop there.

Now there are fresh innovations from online retailers that are taking the idea of showrooming to new levels.

Zappos wants to encourage customers to shop whenever, wherever and opened a 24/7 Holiday pop-up store in Las Vegas in partnership with e-commerce software specialist OrderWithMe. The showroom-style store mirrored what was available on the brand’s website and was a reference to the way consumers shop around the clock, globally. ‘You don’t go to Zappos.com at 3 am and they say, ‘We’re closed,” explained OrderWithMe CEO Jonathan Jenkins.

Zappos pop-up showroom with OrderWithMe

Virtual stores with physical locations are popping up in New York and London. I loved the 3D scan virtual store experiment from ShowStudio’s collaboration with MachineA in spring 2014, for its avant-garde approach to interactive retailing. More traditional in the showroom sense was the DL1961 digital denim pop-up that appeared in New York’s Meatpacking area for the Holiday period offering body-scanning, virtual fit advice and payment/delivery options in a single booth. ‘The DL1961 Digital Showroom is a way to take a product like ours that is based on touch and feel and translate it in a digital space,’ the brand’s creative director Sarah Ahmed told New York’s The Daily.

DL1961 digital showroom

As retail in 2015 re-invents itself courtesy of the digital age, physical stores and digital shopping habits will continue to merge. Personalisation, device-enhanced customer service and clever economies of scale such as localised click & collect (FarFetch is ahead of the curve on that one), will be the new rules of dynamic retailing. Virtual showrooming, billboards for store-fronts and data-crunching personal shoppers will all play a part in the phy-gitalisation of the retail experience in 2015.

Watching the SS15 Moschino show live-stream from Milan last month, you could be forgiven for getting caught up in the saccharine pink, baby-doll Barbie bubble. Orchistrated by maverick designer Jeremy Scott, this show (and overly branded capsule collection), was a #MFW moment that will have a sell by date of roughly one month. Blink and you might miss it. But not if retailers Nordstrom, Selfridges and La Rinascente had anything to do with it. These retailers all started promoting and selling the Barbie line hours after the show (aided by all the Instagram photos showing Anna Della Russo and Cara Delevigne cavorting around in the pieces at the post-show party). Welcome to the era of insta-ready runway collections available to buy now.

Julien David at Colette, Paris

Moschino isn’t the only one leaning on its retail partners for instant runway sales. Colette continues to play the role of retail mentor by showcasing its favourite Paris designers in its window on the same day the labels show on the runways. With a simple poster message to order online for pre-season delivery, customers could snaffle the new SS15 pieces by Julien David and JW Anderson for Loewe almost as the shows finished.

DSM 10th anniversary Louis Vuitton window

Dover Street Market is another pre-season sale protagonist. As part of its 10th anniversary last month, the luxury store hosted the first ‘ephemeral’ boutique for Nicholas Ghesquiere’s debut collection for Louis Vuitton a full month before the collection hit elsewhere.

Ghesquiere Louis Vuitton preview at DSM AW14, London

Colette was also at the centre of the pre-order hullabaloo of the new Apple Watch, previewing for one day only on 30 September in the window and in-store, complete with guest appearance by designers Jony Ives and Marc Newson. Timed to coincide with Paris Fashion Week, this launch was a sure-fire indicator of the luxe-fash-tech appeal for Apple’s much-anticipated new wearable device.

The traditional bi-annual fashion season cycle is now a thing of the past. Designer brands are responding to the ‘want-it-now’ culture of social-media driven commerce and delivering fast-fashion as it happens. And the power of digital is democratizing exclusive collections, from luxury fashion to high-end tech – proving e-commerce and physical stores can work in harmony together